Location:

Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street Cambridge MA

In this seminar, Mounia Chekhab Aboudaya, curator for North Africa and Iberia at the Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, Qatar, and Rachel Parikh, the Calderwood Curatorial Fellow in South Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums, will explore the religious and artistic context behind a large, calligraphic panel venerating the Prophet Muhammad.

This recent acquisition, created in 20th-century Morocco, is as enigmatic as it is striking—there is no known devotional panel like it. However, drawing from other objects, such as pilgrimage guides and prayer books, within Harvard Art Museums...

Location:

Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street Cambridge MA

A large-scale calligraphic panel from Morocco features stylized views of Mecca and Medina and representation of the Prophet Muhammad’s sandals, alongside prayers praising the Prophet and a selection of verses from the Qur’an.

This striking work raises the broad question of representational imagery in an Islamic devotional context as well as the more specific matter of artistic transfer from illustrated copies of the Dala’il al-Khayrat (The Ways of Edification). This famous collection of prayers blessing the Prophet, compiled by the 15th-century Sufi mystic...

The uprisings of the North African Arab Spring exposed the fragility of countries whose citizens were eager to revisit and adapt their identities in the face of a changing world. However, it was impossible for these movements to be coupled with humanitarian pedagogical tools – training and...